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The technical field relates to a graphical display of data, and more particularly to a mechanism which allows separation of graphical display of object status from underlying data. The data is stored in managed object format (MOF) files and defines visual indicators to be displayed.
The Data Management Task Force (DTMF) developed the Common Information Model (CIM) in 1996 to provide a common way to share management information enterprise wide. The CIM schema provides models for various implementations to describe management data in a standard format. A number of graphic user interface (GUI) applications have been developed and deployed which take advantage of the CIM architecture.
According to a presentation by Winston Bumpus of the DTMF presented at the DTMF Comdex Management Presentation, Apr. 3, 2001, entitled, xe2x80x9cNetwork Management and Administrationxe2x80x9d, best of breed applications are used to manage network and system infrastructure. Different applications gather different pieces of data about the same resource. It is difficult to aggregate data from disparate management applications for: service level measurement; true xe2x80x9cend-to-endxe2x80x9d view of a network; fault diagnosis; capacity planning; and resource usage billing. It is currently a very manual process (human intensive), inaccurate, slow and cumbersome. Thus a number of products have been developed, and are currently evolving to solve these problems.
The multi-computer/serviceguard (mc/serviceguard) (hereafter, xe2x80x9cServiceGuard Managerxe2x80x9d) product, available from Hewlett-Packard Company, is a specialized facility for protecting mission-critical applications from a wide variety of hardware and software failures. With this system, multiple (up to 16-nodes) systems are organized into an enterprise cluster that delivers highly available application services to local area network (LAN) attached clients. ServiceGuard Manager monitors the health of each node and quickly responds to failures in a way that minimizes or eliminates application downtime. Status and information gathered about the network is presented to the user (network administrator) via a GUI.
The look and feel of a graphical user interface (GUI) is very subjective. User feedback is therefore essential for a GUI to be successful. It is advantageous to have a method for changing display appearance based on client/user feedback.
Graphical status displays used in the prior art GUIs determine status and corresponding visual indicators in logic that is encapsulated in source code. Thus, to change a visual indicator, or add/delete visual indicators, the developer is required to modify the source code and recompile the application code. Integrating feedback from users into the graphical display application is not easily done with prototyping because of the recoding and recompilation necessary. Moreover, each time source code is modified and recompiled, the risk of introducing new bugs (errors) into the GUI is increased.
The integration of user feedback into the GUI application is an iterative process. Each time the GUI is updated and recompiled, the user is given another chance to provide comments. This can go on ad infinitum until the GUI is deemed satisfactory for its designated purpose. Thus, shortening each cycle of the feedback integration process can improve the overall quality and timeliness of the GUI application.
It is an aspect of the present invention to reduce turnaround time to implement desired changes in a graphical display.
It is yet another aspect to provide a method for customizing the display characteristics of a graphic user interface (GUI) for various users.
These and other aspects and embodiments of the present invention are achieved in a system that isolates all of the information that determines the look and feel of status displays of a GUI into one file. This file can be quickly edited to change the appearance when needed. For example, in one embodiment, a user requests that an object border should be yellow instead of green for a particular situation. This modification is achieved without code recompilation, by editing a few lines in a file. Similarly, if another visual indicator needs to be added, file editing is all that is required. The application source code utilizes a class schema and the modifiable file is read in and processed when the application is launched. Further changes require the application to be restarted to read in the modified file.
According to one embodiment of the invention, a class schema is identified which defines the visual components of the GUI that should be modifiable. The class schema and the corresponding class instances are defined in managed object format (MOF) files. MOF files follow a standard format that is well known to those skilled in the art. It will be apparent to one skilled in the art that as the CIM technology evolves, other formats might be used.
The MOF file contains four types of entries: (1) a primary query entry, which is the first query to run for a given object; (2) an entry connecting the outcome of the primary query with a visual indicator, if any; (3) one or more entries connecting outcome of a primary entry with xe2x80x9csecondaryxe2x80x9d queries; and (4) an entry connecting each of possible secondary query entries with a visual indicator.